From The Bitfury Group Newsroom

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who served as president of Estonia for 10 years before leaving office in October, will serve as co-chair alongside Jamie Smith, ex-chief communications officer for bitcoin mining and blockchain services firm Bitfury and a former official in the Obama White House.

Leading Big Four consultancy firm EY has entered into an agreement with The Bitfury Group, a leading full-service blockchain technology company, CNBC reported.

Under the terms of the agreement, The Bitfury Group will provide blockchain software services to EY and its client network. The deal follows Bitfury bagging the “Best Pitch” at the Ernst & Young Blockchain Startup Challenge, announced last month.

The rapidly increasing popularity of blockchain in the banking and finance sector has spread to the professional services sector with a deal between consultancy EY and blockchain technology provider The Bitfury Group.

The society took part in the recent EY Startup Challenge – and is now offering ongoing advice – to blockchain specialists working with industry to offer digital rights management solutions.Over six weeks, PRS for Music experts worked with two groups, JAAK and BitFury, guiding them through the creation of two unique ideas.

A startup contest hosted by professional services firm Ernst & Young ended with three blockchain companies receiving honors. The six-week E&Y Startup Challenge accepted six blockchain-focused startups in September, which focused on two application areas for the tech: digital rights management and energy transfer. The BitFury Group received an award for “Best Pitch” after it developed a blockchain-based tool for digital rights management.

In July, The Bitfury Group, the world’s leading full service blockchain technology company, in collaboration with the open-source Lightning Network community, released a white paper that offered a solution to a major piece of implementing the Lightning Network – payment routing. The paper introduced a payment routing algorithm, called Flare, which would allow for Lightning Network users to be able to successfully send payments to each other via connected nodes.

The Bitfury Group's Communications and Marketing team was highlighted in today's edition of Politico Playbook, Politico's must-read briefing on what's driving the day in Washington.

Blockchain technology could bring an "economic revolution" in many developing countries where proving ownership of assets or getting access to capital is difficult, Virgin Group founder and billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson said on Monday.

Branson referenced the work of well-known economist Hernando de Soto, who recently announced a partnership with blockchain company BitFury and the Republic of Georgia's National Agency of Public Registry, to trial a land titling program.

The Bitfury Group has launched a Blockchain Trust Accelerator with New America and the National Democratic Institute to create additional pilot projects focused on what they call “blockchain for good” efforts.

Inspired by a white paper released by bitcoin tech firm Bitfury in July, the Acinq team launched 2,500 Amazon Web Service nodes this month as a way to test a proposed routing system for Lightning-style payments earlier this month. Conducted on 18th September, the test put the routing theory proposed in the white paper into practice.

As it showed Lightning nodes could effectively route payments, Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov argued that the test was a significant milestone for bitcoin.